In many ways, the collection of essays Sophie Discovers Amerika: German-Speaking Women Write the New World is a groundbreaking contribution to the emergent field of German Transatlantic Literary Studies. It is a lively and engaging book that seeks to confirm the important role that women writers have played in the transatlantic experience. The volume brings together an impressive, wide range of essays on German women authors from the eighteenth century to the present and their various encounters with and depictions of the New World. It examines fiction, for example by Sophie La Roche, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Gabriele Reuter, Anna Seghers, and Christa Wolf; life writing and travelogues by Ida Pfeiffer, Regula Engel, Klara May, and Milena Moser; journalism by Annemarie Schwarzenbach; and the film adaption of the popular novels on Native Americans by the GDR writer Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. The collection also offers a most welcome bibliography on “The New World in German-Language Literature by Women” that should provoke further scholarly inquiry and important critical work in the context of transatlantic activity.

In their substantial introduction, the editors devote some thought to the well-debated issue of exclusiveness. Why prepare a collection merely of women's writing about the New World? Far from rejecting inclusiveness per se, that is, an anthology of both male and female writers and their transatlantic experience, they argue convincingly that at this early stage of the recovery of women's contributions to New World writing, a diversified collection may seriously curtail an understanding of the breadth and depth of women's experiences.